survey all the beautiful Ideas in the Supreme and will avow that this is Beauty, that
the Ideas are Beauty.^63
Like the sun, Attar’s Simurgh contains all color, and yet embodies non-
presence. Its colorful feathers–the world that we experience around us–
manifest its ethereal invisibility.
Similarly,‘Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani (d. 1078), a Persian scholar of Arabic,
interprets the Quranic expression“my head is all aflame with hoariness”
(Q19:4) through the aesthetics of light, comparing the metaphor with the
sun as the source that makes visible the truth of the unseen.^64 Merging
Islamic with Platonic allusions, neither al-Jurjani nor Attar equate the sun
with God, which would constituteshirk.Rather, the sun’s absolute light
metaphorically describes divine illumination.
The unity of the birds concluding Attar’s poem reflects Suhrawardi’s
explication of the concept oftawhid(unity) through the erasure of the
distinction between individuals, as well as between the individual and God.
The most masterly of all say that,‘you-ness,’‘I-ness,’and‘he-ness’are all terms
superfluous to the Self-Subsistent Essence. They have submerged all three locu-
tions in the sea of obliteration. They have destroyed expressions and eradicated
references.
And everything shall perish, except himself. (Q28:88)
...A great mystic was asked,“What is sufism?”He replied,“Its beginning is God,
and its end is infinite.”^65
The idea resembles the danger described by Socrates in Plato’sPhaedo:
As people may injure their bodily eye by observing and gazing on the sun during an
eclipse, unless they take the precaution of looking at the image (eikona)reflected in
the water, or some analogous medium. So in my own case, I was afraid that my soul
might be blinded altogether if I looked at things with my eyes or tried to apprehend
them with the help of the senses. And I thought that I had better have recourse to
the world ofideaand seek there the truth of things.^66
Just as the birds only become able to perceive the divine light in themselves
through the mirror of truth after preparing themselves through the difficult
journey of the Sufisupplicant, Plato recognizes the danger in being blinded
by the light of truth.
Yet in Attar, neither image nor icon deflects the danger of divine
immolation. Instead, he compares the birds to the mystic al-Hallaj. After(^63) Plotinus, 1991 : 46 (1.6.9). (^64) Vilchez, 2017 : 52, 53 n. 81. (^65) Suhrawardi, 1982 : 95.
(^66) Quoted in Derrida, 1981 : 89 (99d–100a).
98 The Insufficient Image